A Simple Question the Legal Profession has Spent Decades Avoiding | Editorial Note: International Women’s Day Special Issue

THE THREE PIECES we publish today approach that question through different doors, a courtroom, a statute book and a mirror. Finally, they arrive together, at a portrait of a profession. In 2021, nine women held elected positions across all of India's State Bar Councils. Nine, out of four hundred and forty-one! The legal profession had written equality into thousands of petitions but, perhaps, had forgotten to apply it to itself.

Miriam Fozia Rahman, the petitioner in Fozia Rahman v. Bar Council of Delhi, opens the issue with an account of what it took to force change in women’s representation in Bar bodies through litigation. She traces the arc of judicial interventions that followed from Delhi to Karnataka to the Supreme Court and maps how, this year, nearly eighty women contested Bar Council elections in Delhi alone. She is careful, though, not to mistake the mandate for the culture. A court order, she reminds us, is a floor. What is built above it is still to be determined.

Abiha Zaidi turns to what happens to women once they enter a profession that offers them almost no protection from harassment within it. The POSH Act's redressal machinery depends entirely on the existence of an employer. Bar Councils and Bar Associations are not employers. Without that load-bearing relationship, the Act's mechanisms of the Internal Complaints Committee, the enforcement penalties, and the interim protections have no surface to operate on. Abiha is precise about the gap and more importantly, precise about the two statutory routes by which it can be closed, if there is political will to use them.

Senior Advocate Nandita Rao provides the necessary corrections to uncomplicated celebration. The women best placed to benefit from judicial reservations and shifting Collegium attitudes, she observes, have been predominantly upper-caste, upper-middle-class and from legal families. Women from Dalit, minority and working-class backgrounds remain less visible in this opening. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality, she argues that feminism in the Bar must account for the inequalities it risks reproducing and proposes structural interventions to make that possible.

In a video interview with The Leaflet, Justice Sadhna Jadhav, former Judge of the Bombay High Court for a decade, brings the lived experience from within the institution itself. She talks about the structural conditions behind seventy-five years of near-exclusion, the systemic challenges women judges face inside the judiciary, and the issue of representation on the Bench.

This issue is fundamentally about what comes next. The sustained pressure, the unfinished legislation, and the harder work of changing what gets discussed in the room once women are finally in it. We are grateful to our contributors for bringing the clarity and rigour this moment demands, and to Tanishka Shah, whose diligent research and editing support in putting this issue together was crucial to its manifestation.